


Lonely Are the Sufferers

by sayhitoforever



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blood, Brief mention of other characters - Freeform, Frenemies, M/M, Mild Language, Romance, house arrest basically, idiots to friends to who even knows, me looking canon dead in the eye before i murder it, mostly just idiots, plot-flavored LaCroix if you will, some violence, the barest whiff of plot, they're into each other what more do you want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:22:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21635791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sayhitoforever/pseuds/sayhitoforever
Summary: Grimmjow is a professional thief who is given an ultimatum: Six weeks to clean up his life or he’s dead. In which Soul Reaper Ichigo becomes a glorified babysitter and they both catch feelings.
Relationships: Grimmjow Jaegerjaques/Kurosaki Ichigo
Comments: 24
Kudos: 215





	Lonely Are the Sufferers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [junichiblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/junichiblue/gifts).



> To the lovely friend who keeps hauling me back by the scruff of my neck. This one’s for you, J.
> 
> i. Savior / Thirty Second to Mars | ii. Glass House / Machine Gun Kelly | iii. I Never Told You What I Do For A Living / My Chemical Romance | iv. Bother / Stone Sour | v. Blood in the Cut / K.Flay | vi. Way Down We Go / Kaleo | vii. You Fight Me / Breaking Benjamin | ix. Wicked Game (cover of Chris Isaak) / Stone Sour | x. Cherry Wine / Hozier | xi. Save You / Matthew Perryman Jones | xii. I Found / Amber Run

*******

Grimmjow gave the young kid a wolfish grin as he accepted an envelope so thick that the flap had to be taped down. The kid couldn’t even look him in the eye as he reached out to grab the strap of the backpack beneath the barstool at Grimmjow’s feet. Grimmjow couldn’t help but laugh as he noticed the tremble in the teenager’s hands as he shouldered the backpack. The frightened look the kid gave him was too much for his alcohol-muddled brain and he had to grab his glass and shotgun the remainder of it to cut himself off.

“Don’t do anything too stupid,” Grimmjow said with another chuckle as he pulled a bill from the envelope before slipping it into his jacket. He left the bill under his empty glass and stood up. “I ain’t responsible for you now.”

The young kid just nodded numbly, the top of his head barely reaching Grimmjow’s shoulders. He took off through the club without a word, weaving his way through the grinding bodies until Grimmjow lost sight of him amidst the flashing lights. Grimmjow’s head swam with vodka as he pushed away from the bar, intent on leaving. What a nineteen-year-old wanted with four kilos of blow was no problem of his. He reached up to push the hair from his forehead that had begun to fall in the humidity of the club. Too many bodies, too much heat, between the lights and the alcohol and the dancing. He squinted against the orange and yellow strobing across the inside of the club and skirted the walls to avoid the worst of the writhing mass of bodies. Cold air washed over his hot face as he stepped out into the night, reaching out to steady himself on the handle of the door before letting it close behind him. He swayed on his feet, unable to stop himself from smiling at the buzz in his veins and the weight of a couple thousand dollars that sat over his heart.

“Fuckin’ Friday,” he laughed and shoved his hand deep in his pocket to fish out his car keys. The rest was a warm blur, even with the window rolled down, icy air blasting across his face as he drove home.

*******

It was on the Saturday afternoon of the following week that Grimmjow awoke with a head-splitting hangover and a hair-raising feeling that his house wasn’t completely empty. Usually there were people that had passed out through the course of a party, draped over a couch or sprawled out on the floor somewhere. But last night’s party hadn’t gone too out of control and Grimmjow vaguely remembered everybody leaving relatively before dawn. And yet when he rolled over and subsequently right out of his bed, he _felt_ like there was still someone in the house somewhere. Like a sixth sense. Which was a strange feeling to have because Grimmjow had never been too ridiculously concerned about his personal safety.

He staggered to his feet and into the bathroom, thumbing the rumpled waistband of his boxers. He shut his eyes against the harsh light as he flicked the switch on. As he opened them and stared into the mirror covering the wall above the stretch of bathroom counter, a pair of eyes that were not his own greeted him. He whirled around, heart rocketing up into his throat, but there was no one behind him. Grimmjow blinked repeatedly and shook his aching head. He was greeted only with the sight of his own blue hair and bloodshot eyes in the mirror when he looked again. He dry-swallowed a couple ibuprofen before clambering into the shower. That last shot had been one too many, he should have known better.

The silent mansion echoed back the sound of his footsteps as he meandered downstairs to the kitchen, pulling on a t-shirt as he went. Absently, he scavenged through the fridge for something to eat, but nothing looked well enough within his ability to cook without burning his entire house down. He settled on the gallon of milk on the bottle shelf and snagged that. When he closed the door, the same pair of eyes gazed hollowly back at him, reflected in the warped-mirror reflection of the stainless-steel fridge door. He nearly dropped the gallon as he spun on his heel only to stare out over his empty kitchen. He set the gallon on the counter before putting his hands on it too and sucking in a deep breath in.

“You’re just hungover. Stop being a bitch,” Grimmjow murmured to himself. Snatching the gallon of milk from the counter once more, he poured himself a glass, and began to amble around the house to take in last night’s damage.

Nothing was too awful. Well, okay, he was going to have to get a whole new set of dishware, _again._ At least, from the looks of all the broken wine glasses and plates in the kitchen and strewn towards the dining room. He was too afraid to head towards the back of the house to see what color his pool was this time. He settled on heading for the living room to collapse on his hopefully-in-one-piece couch and doze off again in front of the TV. Stifling a yawn, he rubbed sleepily at his eyes before shot-gunning the glass of milk and rounding the corner to head blindly for the couch.

“You’re Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, I assume.”

The sudden voice startled him out of his sleepy wandering and he dropped his cup, the glass kissing the marble with a resonating shatter, sending a spray of crystal. “Holy shit.”

Sobriety flooded through him like he’d been thrown into the pool in January. Seated comfortably on his sofa in the farthest corner was a man Grimmjow had never seen before in his life. He was leaning casual as all-fuck against the arm, his elbow propped on top of it, supporting his chin. He couldn’t have been a guest from last night. Not with how he was dressed almost ridiculously in a black suit jacket and a crisp, white dress shirt, no tie. Long legs clad in pressed dress pants were crossed at the knees. Panic washed through Grimmjow as the man turned his head from where he’d been appraising the painting that hung over the fireplace to look directly at Grimmjow.

His gaze pinned Grimmjow like a butterfly to corkboard. Carved into a face with proud cheekbones and a strong jaw were eyes so hazel they were almost gold and they gazed hard and uncaring at Grimmjow from under furrowed brows. Hair as orange as a summer sunset and long enough to brush at the collar of his shirt, long enough to hang in his haunting eyes. Lips set in a hard line pursed a bit as he considered Grimmjow with uninterested discontent. 

“The fuck are you doing in my house? Who are you?” Grimmjow shouted, wondering if there was a large enough piece of glass on the floor now to use as a weapon.

The man curled his lip ever-so-slightly. Grimmjow could vaguely remember leaving the weekend free for himself and this guy looked like no client Grimmjow had ever taken on. So, this man had no reason to be here and no way to get in unless it had been by Grimmjow’s personal invitation. And Grimmjow had been too drunk for any fun last night.

“How eloquent.” He rose with a surprisingly empowering grace and Grimmjow took a hesitant step back, unsure if this was all really happening or if he was still asleep and having a hideous, vodka-fueled dream. He ended up stepping on broken glass though, a razor-edged piece scissoring into the tender flesh of his left foot. Okay, awake it was.

The man adjusted his suit jacket to hang correctly on his frame before rounding the coffee table. He was tall, nearly eye to eye with Grimmjow. “You’re Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez, are you not?”

Grimmjow was tempted not to answer him. There was something about him that was _off,_ something that had Grimmjow’s hackles up, the hair on the back of his neck on end. Under the intensity of those bright eyes, the words tumbled out of him. “Yes. Who the hell are you?”

“Your reckoning, but I suppose you can call me Ichigo.” And then the orange-haired man smiled and for one brief, terrifying moment, the smile was all sharp, pointed teeth.

*******

Grimmjow was almost immediately convinced that this was some elaborate joke by one of his more annoying associates, a Mr. Kisuke Urahara. The man was infamous for running a spectrum of either ridiculously childish pranks or elaborate hoaxes that were nearly impossible to understand unless they were explained. Although Grimmjow had never been able to place perfect blame on Kisuke for the pranks, he was pretty sure there was no one else he worked with that had the balls to pull the kind of shit that Kisuke did. But it was becoming more apparent by the second that this wasn’t someone sent by Kisuke to play another dumb prank on him. Grimmjow’s second assumption was that this guy was a repo man, even though Grimmjow had never paid a bill late in his entire life. I mean, obviously he was pretty good with money. This thought he fessed up to, but Ichigo just stared at him, stone-faced and unamused.

“If it makes you feel more comfortable, you can pretend I am a repo man when I repossess your soul.” The force of those words had sent Grimmjow staggering back, stepping into more glass and cutting his feet up even worse. He could feel his pulse in his throat, beating like a war drum.

“My _what_?”

“Look, Grimmjow.” The guy grimaced a little as if he was feeling apologetic towards what he was about to say, but the malicious gleam in his bright eyes cancelled out everything else. “I’m going to make this as easy to understand as I can. You will do what I say, when I say it, exactly as I say it, without complaint, without looking for loopholes, or I get to personally ruin your entire life.” How that impossibly flat and monotone voice managed to convey any excitement, Grimmjow didn’t know. And yet.

“What even— Who the fuck do you think you are?” It would be just like him to have left his phone somewhere in his bed and far beyond his reach to call the police.

“You’re doing it all wrong, Grimmjow.” Ichigo shrugged lightly like they were talking about the possibility of rain later in the evening and not Grimmjow’s _soul_. “And I’m here to give you a little window of opportunity to do it all right. A redeeming period. A reckoning. You get six weeks to prove everybody upstairs that you’re actually a decent human being or I get to drag you, kicking and screaming, and do whatever I want to you.”

Upstairs? Who was upstairs? What the hell was this guy talking about? A reckoning, a way for Grimmjow to redeem himself or _die_? What did any of that even mean?

“I don’t— I don’t believe you. You bastard, get the fuck out of my house! Who do you—”

The words were cut short as Ichigo’s hand grasped Grimmjow’s throat and slammed him against the nearest wall. Warm fingers hooked into the tendons of his neck and Grimmjow kicked a little helplessly as Ichigo slowly, so agonizingly slow, raised him from the ground until just the very tips of his toes touched the floor. Grimmjow clawed at Ichigo’s hand and arm to try and free himself, but his actions only made the grip on his throat grow tighter. He gasped for the air just beyond his reach, as Ichigo’s unwavering gaze blistered up at him. Up this close, Grimmjow could tell that Ichigo’s eyes weren’t just brown, there was fire in them. Literal fire that licked at the edges of his blown pupils and flickered dangerously as he glared at Grimmjow. Something otherworldly stared back at Grimmjow through those eyes, stared into him, and he could almost feel the flames on his face, in his chest, burning him from the inside out.

“Listen closely, you can either take the offer or I can kill you now,” Ichigo murmured in the same quiet, controlled monotone that was so unlike the wild light in his eyes. “Make your decision, save me from wasting my time. _Fight back_. Either way, you are my responsibility.” His eyes blazed and Grimmjow felt like he was filling up with fire as he scrabbled at the hand pinning him to the wall.

“The deal,” Grimmjow managed to gasp out, already feeling bruises form on his throat.

“Very well then,” Ichigo said as he lowered him slightly, until his feet were flat on the floor again, before spinning him around, pinning him to the wall, moving his hand to the back of Grimmjow’s neck. Grimmjow had a second to think, _oh, okay,_ as his shirt was pulled up enough to expose his lower back. But then there was a hand there and nothing but searing, white-hot pain, burning something into his skin.

And then Ichigo dropped him without further pretense, hand uncurling from his neck to let him fall carelessly. Grimmjow gasped for fresh oxygen like a newborn as he hit the floor in a crumple of long limbs. Grimmjow pressed a gentle hand to his throat, hissing in pain at the already bruised skin he found there. “Consider yourself under house arrest for the next six weeks. Try to leave without my permission, allow someone to enter without asking first, and I will give you no second option. That’s your only warning.”

When Grimmjow found the strength within himself to open his eyes again, Ichigo was nowhere to be seen. Grimmjow was alone in his home once more, bruised, bleeding, and stunned, surrounded by broken glass and black feathers.

In the mirror the next morning, still talking himself down as if it was a bad dream and nothing more, Grimmjow craned his neck to look at his back and there it was. A bold, black number six seared into the skin of his lower back, like it had been tattooed there.

*******

Grimmjow tested his luck only once. Naturally, he had to. The day after the incident of his mysterious, and terrifyingly attractive visitor, he tested it on the most inconspicuous door in his house. A side door that led out to a small courtyard that was almost entirely boxed in by the house and unseen from anywhere in the backyard. Chewing at his bottom lip, Grimmjow had twisted the handle down and pulled the door open a few inches. No alarm went off, nobody came storming after him, nothing happened. He furrowed his brows in confusion before smiling. Ha, that guy was a complete crack. Grimmjow was really going to have to ask Kisuke how he’d managed to pull that one on him. If he was being honest with himself, the whole thing had freaked Grimmjow out a little bit. He moved to stick his hand out to test the air and see how the day was going to be.

There was a brief, gale-like flutter of air and the door banged shut right on his hand. Grimmjow swore at the top of his lungs and instinctively jerked his hand back at the pain, causing the edge of the door to skid over his mid-finger knuckles and tear the skin on all four fingers. He backed away from the door, shocked into silence, cradling his bleeding hand to his chest.

“I told you not to push your luck.”

Grimmjow nearly tripped over himself as he spun around. That had been Ichigo’s voice, but the bastard was nowhere to be seen.

“This isn’t funny anymore!” Grimmjow shouted into the emptiness of his house, feeling fear-induced rage mount as his own voice echoed back at him, reverberating in the lofty space.

“It was never meant to be funny, Grimmjow.” The voice bounced off the walls and through the house, coming from everywhere and nowhere in particular. Grimmjow swore colorfully again and made his way through the house for the nearest bathroom.

Carefully, Grimmjow ran his hand under lukewarm water, the anger inside his chest burning worse than his hand. He focused on the watered-down blood swirling down the drain of his sink as he spoke next. “I’m not gonna spend a month and a half cooped up like a goddamn recluse because you decided I’m under house arrest. Someone will notice that I’ve got silent. Over my de—” Grimmjow couldn’t finish his sentence though because he felt the phantom pressure of a hand around his throat and the words became stuck.

“Better come up with a good excuse.” Then the pressure was gone and Grimmjow was staring up into the mirror above the sink, blue eyes wide, face blanched of color. He toweled his hand gently and found something to wrap his knuckles with, in a drawer that Kisuke had filled when he’d moved in because he insisted that Grimmjow was too accident prone not to have first aid materials on hand.

“A good— There’s cocaine on my fuckin’ coffee table! I’m not cleaning that shit up.” But no one answered him. “You haven’t even told me why I’m on lockdown!”

With great reluctance, Grimmjow phoned Kisuke an hour after the door slamming incident.

“Good morning, what can I do for you so early on a Sunday?” Grimmjow clammed up almost immediately. Lying to anyone else that worked with would have been a thousand times easier than having to lie to Kisuke who could smell bad blood in the water better than a fucking shark. But this had to be done. If nearly getting the fingers on his right hand chopped off in a door frame was anything to go by, Grimmjow didn’t want to risk any other parts of his body by pressing his luck again. So, he hammed it up, gave a fairly convincing hack, and a sniffle.

“Just wanted to warn ya that I’m not dead, just sick. You might not hear from me for a little bit.” Grimmjow had thought only this part of their conversation through because he knew unless he made it sound like he was seriously ill, Kisuke would just assume he was having another shitty hangover. Or worse.

“What happened, Grimm? You sound disgusting.” Kisuke’s joking tone dropped out immediately.

“Flu or something, dunno. I made a house call. They’re coming by later to check me out.” Grimmjow hacked out another hopefully convincing cough. The silence on the other end of the line made his skin crawl for a moment before Kisuke’s voice broke it.

“Water and vitamins!” he said cheerily and Grimmjow grimaced at his upbeat tone. “You know I’ll call if I go too long without hearing your voice. Especially if I miss you on the twenty-second next month”

 _Shit._ Grimmjow had completely forgotten about the piece he was supposed to help move or house near the end of next month. An unidentified Pollock that Kisuke had found in the garage of some elderly lady in the States who was more than happy to part with it because she had no idea what it really was. Kisuke certainly hadn’t told her what it was either, but that was how he worked best.

“I’ll let you know, alright? Play by play of my suffering.”

“Get better. And don’t starve to death. If you need food, call Tessai.” Kisuke’s assistant was a brilliant, gigantic, and impossibly kind man who could cook like nobody’s business. How he managed to keep Kisuke in check was something that never failed to impress Grimmjow.

“Later, Kisuke.” The line went dead and Grimmjow locked his phone again, staring at the now black screen. It wasn’t a joke then. Kisuke had genuinely bought his story without question. He despised lying and the fact that he just had to do it to his best fence and one of his closest friends set something like acid churning in his gut.

“I hope you’re fucking happy now. You’ve officially fucked up my entire life, Ichigo-who-ever-the-fuck-you-are,” Grimmjow spat out angrily into the empty air.

Suddenly, he felt exhausted, like the gravity and the impossibility of everything that had happened in the last two days was too much from him to stand. He clenched his phone a little too tightly in his uninjured hand, waiting for the seemingly omniscient reply. This was ridiculous, he was being threatened by someone, _something_ , he didn’t know, who was never really present and yet always seemed to be. He was being punished by something which, had it not put its hands around his throat long enough to leave a ring of purple on his skin, he would have believed was a hangover-induced hallucination.

“You did this all on your own, Grimmjow. I’m just here to clean up the mess you’ve made.”

*******

The first week that Grimmjow was stuck, cooped up in his house, he spent each passing day fending off calls for jobs and texting Kisuke novel-length renditions of the ‘pneumonia’ he had. Truly award-winning shit. In the duration of that week, he saw Ichigo only a handful of times. And even then they were brief, fluttering moments where Ichigo was there one moment and gone the next. He appeared without warning and usually without sound, startling the shit out of Grimmjow, to bark out a threat or a snide comment before disappearing. Grimmjow didn’t know how he did it and he’d checked his house from roof to foundation multiple times and had never found Ichigo hiding anywhere. And he always left behind a handful of feathers. Or at least they looked sort of like feathers. Black like a midnight sky in winter, and dusted so lightly in what looked like a fine silver powder. When Grimmjow picked them up, they’d shimmer ever so slightly and he’d crush them in his hand, smooth and broken between his fingers for barely a moment before they dissipated entirely. He was fairly confident that feathers didn’t normally do that, but didn’t want to dwell on it too long.

If the feathers were some sort of sign, some kind of indication that Ichigo was an angel or some shit, Grimmjow wasn’t going to buy into it. Not even if he got paid to buy into it. He might not be particularly religious, but Grimmjow had always been under the impression that angels were supposed to be benevolent, helpful things. According to Ichigo, Grimmjow had fucked up somewhere along the timeline of his life. No explanation as to _how_ he’d fucked up, if it was a singular event or a series of poor life choices. He was still waiting for the dumpster fire progress report of his life, if there was ever to be one. If Ichigo was supposed to be angel with all the feathers and shit, shouldn’t he be _helping_ Grimmjow find the ‘path to righteousness’ instead of trying to kill him and chop his hands off in doors? And angels, they were always in white, right? Ichigo was always in a black suit and now the feathers that he always seemed to leave behind were black too.

By Wednesday afternoon of the second week, Grimmjow had given up on trying to riddle out just what exactly Ichigo was and what Grimmjow was supposed to be repenting for. He’d spent hours a day cleaning up his house, room by room, swearing unendingly when he made it to the one coffee table that still had untouched rails of cocaine on it. He hated the shit, had never touched it outside of a wrapped brick. It felt like a waste to flush it all, but it couldn’t be helped.

Currently, he was comfortably collapsed in the cushions of the couch in his media room, mashing away at the buttons on his Xbox controller, eyes glued to the screen. He was minding his own business and flying under the radar as he had been threatened to do and then Ichigo stepped in the way of the screen. Grimmjow tried not to outwardly show how much Ichigo’s sudden appearance shocked him. So, he moved to sit up with a great huff of irritation to look around Ichigo’s lean frame.

“Do you mind, asshole? You’re in the middle of the picture and this is, like, a pretty important part of the game.”

Ichigo didn’t move though and Grimmjow scooted all the way to the end of the couch so he could see properly. After about another minute of trying to focus on the game and getting killed twice, it was obvious that Ichigo wasn’t going to move, much less leave. So, Grimmjow paused it and leaned back into the couch, thoroughly irritated. He turned his gaze on Ichigo, ready unleash the brunt of his annoyance via a solid death glare but didn’t when he took in the expression on Ichigo’s face. The poor sucker looked _confused._ Which was a strange, constipated looking expression for him, Grimmjow had to admit, with his brows pulled together and the corners of his mouth pulled down into a frown. It was unfair by all counts as far as Grimmjow was concerned that the ugly expression didn’t make the unreasonably attractive invader any less good looking. He stood, outlined by the bright light of the screen behind him, his face mostly shadowed.

“The fuck is that look for?” Grimmjow griped, shifting the game controller in his hands.

“What are you doing?” Ichigo’s voice was just as flat and monotone as it always was, devoid of any emotion.

“Uh, playing the new Call of Duty.” Ichigo’s confused expression took on an edge of frustrated, lines forming between his brows and the muscles along his jawline tightening. Grimmjow didn’t like that at all, he _loved_ it. “You know, laying low, growing more broke by the day, and generally rotting away because _you_ told me to.”

“So, you’re just going to listen to me?” Was that a hint of hysteria Grimmjow detected in Ichigo’s voice? Couldn’t be.

“Well, you actually tried to chop my hand off in a door, so, yeah. I’m pretending it’s a vacation where I can sit around and play video games and eat junk food and not give a shit like I did when I was in high school. So, thanks, man. Real generous of you.” The muscle in Ichigo’s jaw tightened again and a sick sort of glee thundered in Grimmjow’s chest. If those muscles were flexed anymore, they might snap and that would be awesome.

Therein, Grimmjow found himself a new mission in his house-arrest life.

“Actually, you should threaten me to work out too and then when I’m finally done being sick—” Grimmjow made quotes with his fingers mid-air. “Maybe I’ll be extra ripped. Can I get a spectacular ass in six weeks? Is that a thing?” Grimmjow watched with savage satisfaction as the fingers on Ichigo’s right hand curled in one by one, forming a tightly clenched fist. “Also, does house arrest cut me off from having shit delivered by Amazon, or Postmates? Gettin’ pretty tired of fending for myself.”

“You—”

“Are doing _exactly_ what you told me to do. Nobody in and I can’t go out.” He raised the controller in his hand like it was a glass of champagne he was toasting. “To poorly worded threats, hmm?” Grimmjow relaxed against the arm of the couch and unpaused the game, determined to pay attention out of spite. He blinked when he threw a grenade and the screen went white briefly and then Ichigo was gone. A few black feathers fell gracefully, soundlessly to the carpet, and Grimmjow groped for the TV remote wedged between the couch cushions to turn up the volume and drown out the silence of his house.

*******

“Somebody just dropped this off for you,” Ichigo’s voice came out of the blue one morning as Grimmjow was standing in the shower, scrubbing shampoo into his hair.

Like a startled cat, Grimmjow seized up and whirled around, only to be met with a literal waterfall of seafoam-green diamonds cascading over the edge of the shower stall glass and smacking him directly in the face.

“What in the shitting hell!” Grimmjow shouted as one of them pelted him directly in the eye.

“Thought I told you nobody in and you can’t go out.”

Grimmjow listed back to let the water wash the soap from his hair and eyes before stooping to retrieve one of the hundreds of stones that now littered the stone floor of his shower. He held it up to inspect it. They were beautiful, the color the soft aqua of sea glass, and each one roughly the size of a single carat. He could have been standing in about a million dollars, if only they weren’t made of paste. He knew exactly who’d sent them. She must have finally received the gift that he’d fenced to Kisuke months ago. Grimmjow lifted an arm and rubbed the steam from the glass so he could see Ichigo’s face and so that Ichigo could see everything else. Ichigo’s blazing eyes glowered at him from the other side of the glass, resolutely looking at _only_ his face, empty box still clutched in his long fingers. Grimmjow just grinned and flicked the paste gem at Ichigo. It plinked against the glass before rejoining the pile of them on the floor at Grimmjow’s feet.

“You’re impossible,” Ichigo groaned as Grimmjow turned away from him. There were feathers on the bathmat when Grimmjow finally exited the shower, leaving behind the beach of fake diamonds clogging the drain.

*******

It had become Grimmjow’s only mission in life to make Ichigo sorry that he had imprisoned Grimmjow in Grimmjow’s own house. And, for all the mystical and magical things Ichigo could be, Grimmjow’s mission was going rather well. For the first few days, the comments Grimmjow made were much like the ones when Ichigo interrupted his Call of Duty marathon: pointed, accusatory, but lacking any real heat. Ichigo mostly just stared blankly at Grimmjow as though they didn’t speak the same language. He was so uptight and always dressed in that ridiculous suit like he had other business that he did instead of babysitting Grimmjow. Maybe angels had desk jobs, Grimmjow thought to himself as he brushed his teeth one night. Maybe there was bureaucratic bullshit all the way into heaven, or whatever. And Ichigo was always so expressionless and unresponsive that Grimmjow was starting to get angry that he was wasting solid insults on someone that didn’t even have the nerve to _pretend_ to be insulted. It was during a ridiculous string of chirps while Grimmjow wandered miserably around his kitchen trying to make himself something to eat that Ichigo finally, _finally_ said something back.

“You couldn’t make yourself a proper meal even if your life depended on it. Oh, wait.” Which, okay, that was kind of insulting considering the fact that Grimmjow hadn’t eaten anything but a handful of stale chips in the last day and a half because he really _couldn’t_ use anything in his kitchen and his fridge was miserably empty. But he was so stunned that Ichigo had said something back, that Ichigo had retaliated, he stopped moping momentarily.

“Did you just—” Grimmjow leered at Ichigo accusingly and even Ichigo looked a little startled from where he was sitting at the kitchen table.

After that, their pigtail-pulling became a regular thing. It was weird, the back-and-forthing between the two of them. It felt so disgustingly natural, like the kind of weird, but good-natured camaraderie Grimmjow had with Kisuke. But Ichigo had fire to him, he had all the snap and snarl of a rabid animal when he wanted. And butting his head up against someone so wholly invested in not giving more inches than he took set something burning in Grimmjow like a pilot light.

*******

“You’re the worst!” Ichigo hissed from behind the front door as Grimmjow opened it to find the Postmates guy standing there like a godsend, food in his scrawny teenager arms.

“Thanks, man,” Grimmjow said, truly grateful, and slapped a twenty into the kid’s hand. His eyes went wide as if Grimmjow had done something wrong. “Have a good night.” He closed the door as the kid walked back towards his car, holding up the twenty to the lingering daylight as if it was a fake.

“The fuck do you care? Do you even eat human food?” Grimmjow grumbled as he opened the bag right there in the foyer to let the smell of food waft up. God, he was so hungry.

“Our deal was—”

“It’s hardly a deal if I die of starvation before the six weeks is even up,” he shot back as he wandered into the kitchen, Ichigo trailing behind him, nose finally catching the scent. “Now, do you eat human food or not? Because I’ll gladly save the second burger for myself otherwise, you ungrateful dick.”

*******

“So, you have no one?” Ichigo asked absently one day, whole body shifting left where he sat on the couch as he jerked the Wii remote in his hand, his King Boo inhabited kart spinning off the track. He swore loudly as Grimmjow blitzed past him, red shelling him as he went.

“I don’t have no one,” Grimmjow protested as he gunned for the finish line. “I’ve got people I do business with that I like. I’ve got myself. At least I ain’t here because somebody sent me.”

“Who says somebody sent me?” Ichigo said and Grimmjow was so taken aback by the response, head whipping around to stare Ichigo down that he missed the blue shell that somebody launched at him. And then King Boo was shrieking through the surround sound as he blew into first place.

Ichigo was grinning though, eyes creased with joy as crossed the finish line and shot Grimmjow the epitome of a self-righteous look.

“You cheating motherfucker,” Grimmjow complained as he got knocked to fourth before his kart drifted across the white and black checked line.

A distraction. Maybe not a lie, but Ichigo was laughing and pointing at Grimmjow’s score as the final results filed across the screen, placing him one place below Ichigo. And Grimmjow didn’t want to press his luck, didn’t want to ruin the moment, as disappointing as it was.

“I’ll show you I’m not a cheater,” Ichigo scoffed, rolling his otherworldly eyes. “But, let me pick a different kart first, this one’s too slow.”

*******

“Reform or _die_ is the biggest bullshit plan I’ve ever heard,” Grimmjow grumbled as he thumbed through the contacts on his phone.

He was seated on the couch in his living room, feet kicked up onto the coffee table, fireplace crackling quietly in the corner, the book he’d been reading abandoned beside him. Ichigo was damn near draped across the back of his shoulders like a blanket, hovering like he always was, chin almost tucked into the crook of Grimmjow’s shoulder as he observed. Delete all of your ‘no-good’ contacts, he’d instructed. Eliminate the connection, eliminate the temptation, that was what he’d repeated all day long. Grimmjow was pretty sure everything on his phone was probably backed up at least to somewhere, the great ether of the internet more than likely. He might even be able to recover them all when this was over. Ichigo finally piped in as he scrolled passed Kisuke’s number.

“I said _all_ of them, Grimm,” Ichigo said, bumping his head against Grimmjow’s, hair tickling his cheek.

Scowling, Grimmjow headbutted him right back. “Fuck you, not Kisuke.” Grimmjow paused. “I have his number memorized anyway, so deleting it is pointless.”

“Fine,” Ichigo conceded, but he sounded anything but deterred. 

Grimmjow felt cheated somehow. He knew the whole quit cold turkey thing worked for some people, but that was mostly for like alcohol and cigarettes, right? Grimmjow had worked hard in his time as a professional thief to work for no one but himself. He never accepted any job where he wasn’t in complete control. He never wanted to answer to someone else, he never wanted to have to owe someone else, he only allowed himself to be contracted out on his own terms. If he stopped calling people completely all of sudden, there were bound to be a few people that would get suspicious, wonder what happened, wonder if he got caught finally. Some of the shit he knew, there would be a lot of people out there desperate to keep him quiet if they thought the feds had scooped him up.

“That not good enough for you? What the fuck am I supposed to do next? Go out of my way to buy ethically sourced tomatoes?”

“You hate tomatoes,” Ichigo pointed out with exasperation, his sigh ruffling Grimmjow’s unstyled hair. 

“That’s not the point!”

“Eliminate the connection, eliminate—”

“The temptation. Yeah, I heard you the first fifteen fuckin’ times,” Grimmjow griped with a roll of his eyes that Ichigo couldn’t see. A log shifted in the fireplace, sending a crackle and a spray of orange sparks up the chimney. The faster he got this over with, the faster he could go back to reading quietly.

Ichigo’s hand came around his other shoulder, out of his peripheral’s, to rest comfortably as he tapped the next contact on Grimmjow’s phone. “Her next.”

*******

In the beginning of the third week, Grimmjow began to unearth all the pieces he’d swiped over the last year that he’d yet to fence. Ichigo followed him from room to room, appearing in one corner, only to vacate the space he occupied and reappear in the next room. Grimmjow dismantled two kitchen cabinets, pulled up the half of the carpeting in his own bedroom, and damn near gave himself hypothermia by getting in his pool to take the cover off the pool light to retrieve a stashed bag.

“Why jewels?” Ichigo asked, sprawled out on the first few steps of the staircase as Grimmjow set up a ladder ahead of his front door.

“Well, cash is king, right? But cash ain’t so easy to steal, not with the way security is for anywhere you go, even convenience stores. And robbing banks is just dumb, it’s not the eighties anymore.” Grimmjow paused, shaking out his sore hand before reaching back up and wiggling a short piece of crown molding from far above the front door He stuck his hand in the opening he revealed and pulled out a plastic bag of wrapped, loose stones. “Plus, cash is heavy. It’s a gram per fuckin’ bill. All those movies of bank robbers slinging duffel bags stuffed full of cash like they weigh nothing, total bullshit.”

“Don’t you feel bad about the stuff you steal?” Ichigo asked as Grimmjow fit the wooden chunk of molding back into place as precisely as possible. He supposed he should say that it did bother him, that was probably the answer Ichigo was looking for. That he felt remorse, that he felt guilty for taking something that didn’t belong to him, that it was wrong.

“All the stuff I swipe is insured. Those people didn’t lose a dime.” Grimmjow smoothed his fingers across his handiwork, assuring that it looked seamless again. His stomach gave an audible rumble and he decided then that whatever else he’d hidden away would have to wait.

“Yeah, but it’s jewelry, right? Things like that hold sentimental value to some people, from their family or other loved ones.” Ichigo paused as Grimmjow descended from the ladder. “Don’t you feel bad that you’ve taken something important away from someone?”

Grimmjow came up short, feet firmly planted on the last rung of the ladder. He looked at the bag in his hand thoughtfully for a moment. He knew what was in it, a couple of ridiculous size rubies worth at least five, maybe six figures, if his fence was feeling generous. They were from a necklace he’d taken from an elderly widow’s house almost a year ago. The silver of the necklace and stone settings had been so old, parts of it beyond repair even by a master silversmith. It had been a wonder it was still in one piece at all. It hadn’t even taken that much effort to break it down, scrap the silver for cash, and stash the stones. The necklace had been beautiful, Grimmjow could admit that to himself, remembering the filigree that had held the center ruby. There had been little to no tarnish on the piece though, suggesting that she must have worn it often enough for her skin to keep it clean. He didn’t exactly have any possessions that he treasured like that. Had nothing leftover from his childhood, not that he’d really been allowed to have much. Moving from foster house to foster house had taught him to keep only what he needed in nothing more than a backpack. He wasn’t sure there was anything he owned even now that he would miss if it got stolen tomorrow.

“Huh,” he murmured, taking the last step down to the floor, shifting the plastic bag in his hands. “Never thought about it like that.”

Grimmjow wandered into the kitchen, setting the bag gently on the edge of the counter. He opened the fridge and began to pull out the assortment of leftover take-out containers from yesterday, pushing them onto the island counter. Ichigo was already seated in a barstool, having moved as soundlessly as he always did.

“This is really your job, huh? Holding my hand while you try to lead me down the straight and narrow path to redemption?” Grimmjow watched as Ichigo wrinkled his fine-boned nose in disagreement.

“It’s not a _job._ It’s my responsibility to help souls pass on to their proper resting place. If I didn’t, the world would be full of lingering spirits, growing more distraught by the day.” Ichigo paused. “Sometimes people reach a tipping point. Between what’s right and what they want and sometimes they need a little push. A reminder that all that separates them from an eternity of Hollow misery is their choices.”

“Sounds like a job to me,” Grimmjow mumbled under his breath as he shut the fridge door, trying to ignore the jab about eternal suffering. “Sounds like a lot of work for one person.”

“I don’t do it alone,” Ichigo scoffed, throwing Grimmjow an almost guarded look, as if their conversation was entering territory that Grimmjow didn’t belong in.

Grimmjow stopped, fingers hovering under the paper edge of a container, head snapping up to look at Ichigo. “There’re more of you assholes?”

“Well, yeah. Did you think you were special, Grimmjow?” The glint of mischief in his flickering eyes was hard to miss, even from the other side of the island counter.

“Shut the fuck up, no. Where are all the other ones then?” Grimmjow began to put the containers in the microwave one by one, trading them out and pushing them towards Ichigo when they were ready.

“Fulfilling their own responsibilities,” Ichigo replied, shaking his head as if the question had been stupid.

“They all make equally as shitty contracts to babysit wayward humans as you do?”

“No. Some don’t make contracts at all,” Ichigo stated, eyeing Grimmjow with an expression that screamed he should consider himself lucky.

Grimmjow frowned. “So, what, when you’re done supervising my every move, ya move onto the next sorry bastard?”

“More or less.”

That what-ifs went unspoken. But Grimmjow wasn’t a moron, he would read between the lines that Ichigo was laying down. If Grimmjow, whose soul was perched at some philosophical tipping point, failed, then it was a one-way trip to damnation, forever. But that was only once he died, right? So, potentially, he could live another sixty years doing whatever the fuck he wanted before somebody came back, maybe even Ichigo, and dragged his ass to Hell, or wherever. Or did Ichigo really plan to kill him after the deal expired if he did anything less than pass? What would happen if he didn’t fail, but didn’t exactly pass? It wasn’t as though he felt like he’d been making progress towards becoming some kind of goody two-shoes since Ichigo had arrived. He had stopped committing crimes due to his barely enforced house arrest. Did that count for something?

“What happens if time runs out and I’m still straddling the fence?” he asked, unable to curb his curiosity. “Are you going to kill me?”

“No!” Ichigo went rigid in the barstool, eyes fixed determinedly down at the granite countertop. “No, I’m not going to kill you,” he murmured after a while, too long for Grimmjow’s comfort. “That’s— I don’t think it would fix anything if I did. If I kill you and you’ve learned nothing, then you’ll just become a Hollow.”

Grimmjow was desperate to ask what a Hollow was, desperate like a tweaker needing their next fix. But the distraught look on Ichigo’s face, the tired, purplish circles under his dark eyes stopped the words in his throat. He felt safe in assuming that maybe a Hollow was the opposite of a Soul Reaper, the opposite of Ichigo. And if Ichigo could say it like it was a bad thing, then maybe it really was.

“And if I’ve learned nothing?” Grimmjow asked hesitantly, hating the silence that followed.

Ichigo looked thoughtful as he opened a container of noodles, letting the steam out. “I don’t really know. I’ve… never failed before. I’ve only known of one other Soul Reaper who was contracted and never returned.”

“Overachiever,” Grimmjow muttered, letting out a breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding, Grimmjow tried to roll the tension out of his shoulders. Ichigo just rolled his eyes, a fond grin pulling the corners of his mouth up. “Really? What happened to them?”

Ichigo accepted the chopsticks and the plate Grimmjow handed over, arranging them accordingly as he started to help pop some the rest of the take-out boxes open. “Dunno. We can’t exactly be killed, not by humans at least. I always assumed she either failed and was too humiliated to return or—” Ichigo cut himself off abruptly, eyes going comically wide for a moment, blanking out as he stared at Grimmjow while something like an epiphany flitted across his face.

“Or what?” Grimmjow asked around a mouthful of food, an eyebrow quirked up.

“Nothing, nevermind. She probably failed,” Ichigo said hurriedly, reaching for another box.

“Nuh-uh, that face you just made didn’t exactly scream failure.” Grimmjow pointed his chopstick emphatically at Ichigo.

“I don’t know!” Ichigo yelled, and Grimmjow leaned back at the sudden outburst. He couldn’t help the incredulous look he was giving Ichigo. He’d never seen the bastard lose his cool over anything except Mario Kart, and that was almost explicitly reserved for Rainbow Road. The way he was refusing to look at Grimmjow, the way he was looking at everything _except_ Grimmjow, was beginning to piss him off. He looked so uncomfortable, shoulders tense, long fingers gripping the chopsticks so hard that Grimmjow was shocked they hadn’t snapped yet. Why Ichigo looked like that was beyond him. He should be thrilled even, having made Grimmjow heavily consider the moral semantics of stealing beloved family treasures from unsuspecting people. That had to be progress in somebody’s book.

“Maybe she decided to stay.”

 _Stay?_ Grimmjow blinked, the statement shorting his brain like a blown lightbulb. “Ohh,” he said before wiggling his eyebrows. “She got _attached._ Maybe literally, if ya know what I mean.”

The look Ichigo gave him could have peeled paint, but at the very least his shoulders seemed to sag, if only just a bit.

Grimmjow grinned, spearing a piece of broccoli on the end of one chopstick. “Careful, Ichi. Keep making those bedroom eyes like that at me and you and I might just become _attached_ to each other.”

Like air hissing out of a balloon, Grimmjow felt the discord between them dispel, leaving him with another sigh he hadn’t realized he’d been holding back. Ichigo was staring down at the chicken he was piling onto his plate, but there was a small smile tucked in the corner of his mouth that hadn’t been there before.

Ichigo tried to feign an expression of dumbfounded surprise. “Attached? _To you?_ Maybe if I was blind, deaf, and morally corrupt.”

“Oh yeah, ya know I love it when you talk dirty to me. Keep it up, you might end up being stuck with me forever.”

Ichigo rolled his eyes with all the melodrama that Grimmjow had come to know that he possessed. “What a tragedy that would be.”

*******

Grimmjow was in the basement two days later, pummeling at the hanging sandbag in his makeshift home gym, headphones in and music blasting, when the hair on the back of his sweaty neck stood on end. He clenched his right hand into the perfect, tight-knuckled fist and whipped around, moving on the pivot of his hips, and punched out. His fist connected with the palm of a hand that absorbed the entirety of his hit without flinching. Grimmjow wasn’t prepared for the foot that swept his legs out from under him, knocking him to the polished concrete. The air whooshed from his lungs as his back hit the floor and his head bounced painfully, bringing stars into his vision. He bit off a howl of pain as a forearm slammed against his chest, just below his throat, pinning him to the floor with a strength that left him breathless. The other hand trapped his fist to the floor, squeezing until a couple of his knuckles popped in protest. Weight settled across his hips and when the stars cleared from his vision, he could see Ichigo above him, nearly straddling him.

“You’re not listening, Grimmjow,” Ichigo said, face as blank as it always was, his gorgeous eyes half-lidded as he stared down.

“I’m following your very stupid rules,” Grimmjow snapped, blue eyes flashing with rage as he glared up. The sweat from his workout was dripping down his collarbones and neck, running into his already soaked hair. The cold floor felt good against his hot skin, but it was hard to enjoy with the pain everywhere, the back of his head, his chest, his fuckin’ wrist that he was convinced was going to snap if Ichigo squeezed any harder.

“Memorizing the steps makes no difference if you don’t learn the technique.”

“Fuck you and your fortune cookie bullshit,” Grimmjow growled and tried to sit up against the press of Ichigo’s forearm, but it was like a steel bar across his chest. “You _want_ me to fail. You said so from the beginning. You don’t give a shit if I learn anything.”

Grimmjow’s phone was on a chair by the door, lighting up even now, buzzing against the fabric as a steady stream of messages came in. He’d been shopping around for new pieces all morning, looking for leads or any information of interest. He’d had to call in a couple of favors he had banked, to budge a few of the people who held back. It was hard to miss the sound of it, even over his heavy breathing and Ichigo’s muted voice.

“You lie, and cheat, and steal, and swindle your way into the good graces of people who’re no better than you are.” Ichigo’s lip curled as his eyes flickered dangerously, so awfully close to Grimmjow that it was almost all he could see. Just a vision of amber and fire. “Your actions have hurt people, _innocent_ people.”

“I haven’t hurt anyone,” Grimmjow ground out around in defense, chest beginning to ache under the strength of Ichigo’s arm.

“I forget that you humans always think that the ‘how’ in which you achieve your desires doesn’t matter,” Ichigo said with narrowed eyes. “Your actions have consequences. I am those consequences.” 

Grimmjow was hot in his bones, sweating with the rage that was crackling through him as he glared up at the inhuman, angel, soul-reaping, piece of shit holding him down. “So it’s your job to think less of me? To look down on me? _Fuck you,_ ” Grimmjow spat with venom and brought his knees up, planting his feet flat on the floor for leverage.

Maybe he was rusty, maybe the years of living comfortably had softened him a little, but the dirty kick he delivered to Ichigo’s thigh and the elbow he drove into Ichigo’s jaw felt just like a muscle memory. The muscle memory of a kid who’d had to fight all his life to get what he wanted, to survive, to _win_. With most of his upper body strength committed to holding Grimmjow down with his arms, Ichigo’s lower body crumpled under the force of Grimmjow’s kick, his chin slamming against Grimmjow’s collarbone. Gritting his teeth against the burst of pain, Grimmjow twisted his wrist free and flipped his body, throwing all of his weight onto Ichigo. He sunk a knee into the soft space below Ichigo’s diaphragm, relishing the sound of the wounded groan that whooshed out. Hoping his skull wasn’t made of the same metal that his arm had felt like, Grimmjow grabbed ahold of Ichigo’s throat with one hand and slugged him in the jaw as hard as he could with the other.

“Stop wasting my time!” Grimmjow roared, knuckles throbbing as he tightened his hand to swing again. A torrid burst of satisfaction filled his chest as he saw red welt up on Ichigo’s cheek. “Tell me what I’m supposed to be doing or I’ll kill you,” Grimmjow ground out, squeezing tighter around the supple flesh of Ichigo’s neck.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” Ichigo said, flashing an easy grin that made Grimmjow’s head spin. His pupils were blown, nothing but fire wreathed in a thin circle of honey-brown stared up at Grimmjow. And that was, well that was not the response he’d been expecting at all, and it sent blood to places he didn’t currently need blood to be.

Body going hot all over, Grimmjow practically scrambled to get off of Ichigo, going so far as too stand up in a rush. The sharp movement brought a wave of dizziness. Ichigo propped himself up on his elbows, body lean and stretched out on the floor, his white dress shirt rumpled from Grimmjow’s hands, the shadow of a red mark where it had bloomed along his jaw. He looked debauched, the slightest pink high in his cheeks and that same smirk, the way his hair fell around his freshly wrinkled collar, into his eyes. Grimmjow felt the tips of his fingers tingling, the knuckles of his one hand aching. _No_ , he was not attracted to the supernatural asshole currently sprawled on his basement floor, _no_. No matter how fucking gorgeous his eyes were, or how pretty his dumb orange hair was, or how stupid good he smelled, something like a forest fire and clove. Grimmjow hated that he knew that now. But the look in Ichigo’s eyes was a challenge, a defiance that set Grimmjow’s teeth on edge. That was the look of someone who didn’t just think they were better, but knew they were better, had already decided.

Maybe attempting to beat the shit out of his otherworldly warden, who had made it clear on too many occasions just how easy it would be for him to sneak up and snap Grimmjow’s neck like a wet toothpick, was not the best idea. Ichigo may have displayed the patience of a saint thus far, but Grimmjow had to be pushing his luck by now. Grimmjow reached up with both hands to smooth his blue hair back, fingers deftly checking to make sure Ichigo hadn’t split his head open like an overripe melon. It stayed back mostly, wet with sweat, but a few straggling strands fell in his eyes.

“I told you, you have to prove yourself,” Ichigo said finally, sitting up fully and reaching up to massage his reddened cheek gingerly.

Grimmjow’s hands curled into fists at his sides involuntarily. “And just what kind of groveling is it gonna take to prove that my soul’s worth keeping?”

“If I give you all the answers, that’d be a bit like cheating, don’t you think?” Ichigo commented, palm still cradling his jaw, amusement still in his eyes. They were both quiet for a moment, Grimmjow trying to reign his temper in and suppress the urge to tackle Ichigo again and lay into that smug face. “You don’t have to be that person anymore,” Ichigo said quietly after a moment.

Grimmjow tensed, hands still in white-knuckled fists. “What person?” Grimmjow growled.

“You know what one. The one who had to compromise his morals to make sure he ate, to make sure he had a roof over his head.” Ichigo said it so easily, sounding almost friendly, almost forgiving. As if what he said wasn’t enough to make Grimmjow see red. “Now you just do it for the thrill of it. You just do it because you think you’re good at it. And you are, but being some expert jewel thief who takes on side projects when he’s bored isn’t gonna save your soul.”

“Seems like it’s already too little, too late,” Grimmjow muttered, lip curling in disdain.

“What you did to survive then was _different_ , Grimmjow. Did you have a Soul Reaper sent after you when you were fourteen? _No_. You got one sent after you now because you’re already surviving, you shouldn’t be doing this shit anymore.” Ichigo looked exasperated as he glared up at Grimmjow. “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“It’s not like I’m going to get anything out of cleaning my act up now.” He shrugged, tried to be nonchalant about it, but inside he was a maelstrom of cold rage.

“You’re just supposed to be good, _do_ good! You’re not supposed to work at it like there’s an end goal, like there’s a reward for being a fucking decent human being!” Ichigo bit out, voice rising.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grimmjow snarled, the acid of his anger like poison in his veins. Out, he needed to get out. Out of the room, out of the house, agreement be damned.

Ichigo gave him a withering look. “Don’t I? I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“Maybe I don’t want you to save my soul,” he snapped, seething, turning his back to Ichigo, unwilling to look at his face any longer. He snatched his phone off the chair and made a beeline for the exit.

“You wouldn’t have taken my offer if that was the case,” Ichigo murmured nearly to himself, but deflated a little as Grimmjow thumped up the stairs, slamming the basement door behind him.

*******

Grimmjow rarely smoked. When it happened, it was usually socially, because he was shitfaced, or used as a good way to stand outside a place for extended periods of time without looking like trouble while he was casing his next job. He was standing under the scorching spray of the shower after scrubbing his knuckles until they were raw and red when he decided a cigarette was the only thing that was going to ground him. He toweled off in a rush and threw on an old sweatshirt and a pair of clean jeans before swiping the pack and a lighter off his dresser. He trudged into one of the guest bedrooms, the one with a half-angled roof in one corner, and stood on his tiptoes to pop open the skylight. He put the cigarettes and lighter in his mouth and gave a short jump to grab ahold of the windows edge before hoisting himself up and onto the roof. Wishing he’d put socks on as the autumn air gusted over the ridge of the roof, ruffling his still damp hair and sending a chill through him, he hunkered down on his back beside the open window. He lit up and set the pack on his chest before tucking an arm behind his head, holding the first inhale in until it burned. Grimmjow exhaled a trail of smoke and glowered up at the night sky.

So, what, he was just supposed to change every last thing about himself, all the ways he knew how to live, in order to appease some angelic bastard? Some soul salvaging asshole who thought that house arrest was the best way to deal with Grimmjow? _Fuck that_. If he agreed, if he let it happen, would he become what Ichigo was? What the fuck even _was_ Ichigo? Grimmjow refused to believe he was angel, no matter how many fucking black feathers he turned to glitter between his fingers when he crushed them, or how many times Ichigo appeared and disappeared like some sort of illusionist. He’d said he’d come to repossess Grimmjow’s soul. Now he was telling Grimmjow that he didn’t need to be ‘that person’ anymore. Frankly, who Grimmjow was just so happened to be the only person he knew how to be. Only so many choices for a kid going in and out of foster homes all his life, the houses of people who did it not to provide love and a home to those who needed it, but for the government’s money. Money, Grimmjow learned at an early age, was King. That was how it all started right? Realizing he needed money to live, and even more money to enjoy living. He didn’t matter, so other people didn’t matter, so how he lined his pockets shouldn’t matter either. Or so he thought. 

He lay still for a little while, cigarette burning to the filter between his fingers, blue eyes watching the sky grow darker as night settled in. Grimmjow wished he could find comfort in the silence, a good enough distance away from the city proper for it to be so quiet, but it was like his ears were trained for any sound coming from inside. With a scowl, he lit up another cigarette and closed his eyes, tried to force himself to relax. The collar of his sweatshirt was damp and clinging to his neck, sending a fresh wave of goosebumps down his body. If angels repossessed souls, the fuck did demons do? What was the opposite of Ichigo? Would Grimmjow get to keep living his life if he acquiesced and played along, if he even tried just a little? What would happen if they failed? He’d go to Hell? Grimmjow snorted and stubbed the cigarette out on a roof tile.

He felt a flutter and the same instinctual reaction every time Ichigo was nearby, and he frowned. “Fuck off!” he shouted down through the open window. No way was he talking to that fucker again, he was still stewing over everything. And trying to calm down from it, damn him.

Grimmjow waited but Ichigo’s presence had come and gone without so much as a whisper from him. Doubting he’d heard the last of that conversation from the basement, he sat up with a sigh. Fine, he could be an adult about it. He could have a serious conversation with Ichigo, across the room from him, with several physical obstacles between them for protection. Standing, he angled himself over the window and gripped the ledges again. Grimmjow’s laptop was sitting on the edge of the guestroom dresser, open, something pulled up on the screen. With a huff, he lowered himself back into the room, bare toes curling against the warmth of the carpet as they found solid ground again. He pulled the skylight closed and locked it before turning towards the computer he absolutely had not put there. Not only had he not put it there, it had definitely not been logged in either. A black feather sat on the backlit keyboard and Grimmjow scowled, snatching it up and crushing it into ash in his palm. He reached down to angle the screen correctly as he read what page had been pulled up in the browser. It was a fundraiser of some kind, with a progress bar of funds donated in the upper corner that was barely filled. The date beside the amount said that the campaign had been posted sometime last week. He scrolled further.

And that was the kid. The one from weeks ago that he'd given a backpack of blow to. He squinted against the laptop's harsh light as he reached to scroll down the page and read the caption below. Dead. _Killed_ , Grimmjow corrected himself internally as he read over the emotional declaration from what could have only been the kid's mom, begging for money to cover the cost of the funeral and cremation services. There was nothing in the message that said how the teenager had passed, not that he'd been expecting all the details to be laid out. Grimmjow chewed at the inside of his cheek for a moment as he stared at some of the pictures that had been added of a young, smiling kid. A zing of guilt went through him at a photo of what looked like the kid and his mom during Christmas. There was no proof that the cocaine had anything to do with his death, but Grimmjow wasn't a moron.

“Shit,” he whispered and rocked back on his heels, scrubbing a hand down his face.

Is this what Ichigo had meant, about not needing to be ‘that person’ anymore? He didn't need to sell that blow, didn't even need the money from it. It was just a favor for an old friend to take it off his hands. He didn't need to sell it to a kid either, he could have given it to literally anybody else. He could have given it to Kisuke for fucks sake, Kisuke would have taken and pawned off anything just because. Kisuke had accepted things from him with less value just because he’d thought they were interesting.

Gnawing at his bottom lip, Grimmjow scrolled back up to the top of the page where the campaign’s cost was posted and broken down. Funerals, Grimmjow decided then and there, were stupid expensive. Expensive enough for a grieving mother to suspend her pride to beg strangers on the internet for money. $23,000 was nothing to him, he could make that on a bad day, blindfolded and bound even. With a heavy sigh, Grimmjow picked the laptop up, balancing it on one of his forearms. He moved the cursor to the donate button and waited for the next page to load, one with an empty field for him to enter the amount he wanted to give. The progress bar to the right said that only two grand of the twenty-three hundred requested had been raised so far. Two grand extra should be fine, Grimmjow decided as he typed the five digits into the box, selecting to remain anonymous. The next line asked for his card number and he grumbled, knowing his wallet was somewhere downstairs.

The house was utterly and eerily silent as he padded down the stairs. His eyes checked every corner, every sittable surface he passed, for Ichigo, but he was alone. He wound his way down the halls to the full bar in the back of the house. He set the computer on the bar top and snatched his wallet from where it was half-wedged in a chaise cushion though he couldn’t remember how it had got there. He entered his information and hit submit, watching with tired eyes as the page spun and spun as it processed. That cigarette wasn’t going to cut it now, not with the way his chest was aching strangely. He was going to need something stronger. Grimmjow reached behind the bar for the bottle of scotch he’d neglected to return to the cabinet from the party weeks ago. He groped blindly for a glass, bringing forward a highball glass, but he hardly gave a shit as he poured it half-full.

*******

That was what Ichigo found a few hours later when he decided to drop in again, knowing his ‘hint’ had been about as subtle as a gun. Music echoed through the halls, though it grew louder as Ichigo moved into a room in the back of the house he’d never been in before. He was met with the sight of Grimmjow leaning dependently against a bookshelf that stretched to the ceiling and took up the entirety of the wall. A book was balanced in one hand, its spine cradled in his palm, and in the other was a glass that he held almost too carelessly in his long fingers. It had maybe a mouthful of liquid left in it. The decanter that sat on the table beside the chaise was near empty, though Ichigo didn’t know how much had been in it to begin with. The laptop he had sniped from a bedside table and left for Grimmjow to find was sitting open on the bar, a credit card still propped against the keyboard.

Grimmjow was warm, a buzz like a swarm of bees in his veins and in his head. He’d pulled a book off a shelf because he couldn’t remember buying it, but the words were a swirl in front of him. He kept blinking, trying to force his eyes to focus, but it was no use. Vaguely, as if it were far away somehow, he was aware that one of the shelves he was leaning on was digging into his ribs painfully. He wasn’t sure he could stand straight anymore though. He hadn’t bothered to keep track of how much he was drinking. He’d drank until the ache in his sternum eased, then he’d kept drinking to keep it that way.

A shiver ricocheted its way down his spine and he couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled out of him, unbridled. Even drunk he could recognize the cause of that sensation. He snapped the book shut more forcefully than he meant to, frowning at his fingers that had lost their fine motor control. Grimmjow balanced the book on the edge of the shelf, poking at it until he hoped it wasn’t going to fall, before shifting his body. Relying on the bookshelf for support still, he turned around to see Ichigo standing in the doorway. He shimmered a little in Grimmjow’s unsteady gaze, but his face looked pinched, orange brows furrowed as he stared at Grimmjow.

“Knew ya couldn’t stay away for too long,” Grimmjow hummed, drumming his fingers absently against his near-empty glass. Ichigo was regarding him quietly, the distance between them rolling in and out like an ocean wave, or maybe it was because Grimmjow was swaying on his feet.

“I see you got my message,” he said, voice oddly tight even to Grimmjow’s ears.

“Yeah, thanks for helping me cheat,” Grimmjow said goadingly, body loose, with a grin that only somebody blitzed on good scotch could give.

Ichigo made a disagreeable sound in his throat, opening his mouth as if he intended to say something but thought better of it. Grimmjow didn’t like that one bit. Since he’d cracked Ichigo nearly two and a half weeks ago, he hadn’t been able to get him to stop mouthing off. If he was being quiet now, Grimmjow doubted it was anything nice that he was keeping to himself. Lip curling up into a sneer, he stood up straight and was moving, without even really realizing that his body was crossing the room. He slammed the remainder of his glass before leaving it teetering dangerously on the edge of a table.

He crowded Ichigo in with his hips, forcing him to shuffle backwards towards the wall, putting his palms flat on either side of Ichigo’s shoulders to hold himself up. It was the first time that Grimmjow noticed he had an inch or two on Ichigo and the realization made him snort a little. All-powerful, soul reaping, stupid-gorgeous angel asshole was shorter than him. Lean too. Wider in the shoulders than the hips, jaw square, pointed chin. Brown eyes as wide as teacup saucers, the flames licking at the edges of blown pupils, as he stared up. Grimmjow felt like he was seeing Ichigo for the first time. His collar was no longer rumpled from their scuffle earlier and that fact rubbed Grimmjow the wrong way. He still felt like that rumpled shirt, disheveled inside somehow.

“S’up with the Ghost Rider shit your eyes do?” Grimmjow slurred, crooking his head to the side, leaning in closer, closer than he would have ever dared if he’d been sober. He could see the faintest dust of freckles across the delicate bridge of Ichigo’s nose and the tops of his cheeks.

“The what?” Ichigo remarked, eyes narrowing in confusion. He had yet to pull away or duck out of the cage of Grimmjow’s arms. Grimmjow’s eyes, siren blue, so blue that Ichigo could hardly believe that they belonged to a human, were at half-mast from the alcohol and flitting all over Ichigo’s face, unable to focus on one thing.

“Nevermind,” he muttered, that train of thought having already been derailed.

Grimmjow put his nose to Ichigo’s hairline, just at his temple, inhaling the scent there. Spice and the same, earthy smell of a burning pine forest. It was too much for Grimmjow’s alcohol-addled brain, and he groaned low in his throat, the sound making his whole chest vibrate. He drew a line with his nose down Ichigo’s temple before nipping at his earlobe. The hands that gripped Grimmjow’s waist suddenly, he wasn’t sure if they were to steady him or to steady the person those hands belonged to. Either way, they were wicked hot even through the material of his sweatshirt, making him lurch a little. Almost as quickly as they were there, they were slipping away.

“No, keep ‘em there,” Grimmjow said, nose skimming down the length of Ichigo’s neck until he hit the top of the dress shirt collar and went back up. He wanted Ichigo’s collarbones, had a proverbial itch he needed to scratch, and that itch was to mark as much skin as he could get his mouth on, and god damn if the stupid shirt wasn’t in his way.

“What are you doing?” Ichigo asked, voice plunging about an octave deeper than Grimmjow had ever heard it. His hands were back on Grimmjow’s waist again, strong as vises. Grimmjow could feel the press of each one of his fingers, especially his thumbs that were dug into the lines of his hips.

“If I’m already damned, might as well deserve it.” He leaned in and pressed his lips to Ichigo’s without any hesitancy, mouth warm and wet and sweet with scotch.

And Ichigo kissed him like Grimmjow had never been kissed before, like he wanted the air from Grimmjow’s lungs, his hands like anchors where they were no doubt bruising his hips. Grimmjow licked into Ichigo’s mouth like he was hungry for it before letting his teeth close on a full lower lip. The sharp feeling made Ichigo jolt against him, aligning their bodies perfectly from thigh to chin. Grimmjow pulled away for air, the pressure of Ichigo’s body against his too distracting. One hand slid from the wall, finding purchase in a fistful of soft orange hair, long enough to thread his fingers through, long enough to get a good grip of and yank Ichigo’s head back. Ichigo moaned, a guttural animal sound that sent any and all extra blood immediately south. Grimmjow lowered his head, tongue tracing along his jaw, down Ichigo’s neck, and across his pulse point.

“Why,” Grimmjow nearly whined, “the fuck do you taste like cinnamon?” He didn’t need an answer, deciding instead to continue his assault across Ichigo’s jaw and back to his lips.

Ichigo dragged his tongue along the roof of Grimmjow’s mouth, slowly, purposefully, and Grimmjow knew he was pulling a little too hard on the hair in his hand, but he couldn’t help himself. As punishment, Grimmjow ground his hips against Ichigo’s, swallowing the greedy groan he got in return.

He wasn’t sure he’d remember the answer, not with how gone he was, but he had to ask regardless. “Why— why’d you help me?” Grimmjow shuddered as his sweatshirt was rucked up and the heat from Ichigo’s hands increased as he put one flat on his lower abdomen, just above the waist of his jeans. The sound Grimmjow made as Ichigo licked up from the dip at the base of his throat to just under his chin was enough to shake them both. “I don’t want to owe you.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Ichigo murmured, as he gazed up at Grimmjow, his chin cocked, their noses touching, Grimmjow’s hand still fisted painfully in his hair, eyes focused and challenging. “You cheated, remember?”

Black was starting to waver at the edges of Grimmjow’s vision, the impending ambush of a blackout, a nasty one. He burrowed his nose into the juncture of Ichigo’s neck and shoulder and closed his eyes against the spinning of the room, letting orange hair tickle his face, hot hands still splayed across his skin, hauling in a lungful of his forest fire scent. He could practically picture it, standing, wreathed in orange flames, ringed by trees as tall and silent as sentries as they scorched, burning, burning, burning.

*******

He was caught in a cold dream in which he was lucidly aware of everything. A dull hum, like a white noise, drowned out everything except the steady, relentless howl of the wind. A black sky, infinite and reeling, and a crescent moon that hung crooked, illuminating the endless white sands. Rolling dunes as far as Grimmjow’s tired eyes could see. Nothing but white, blankness, emptiness. His mouth was dry with sand, throat burning from lying face down in it, breathing it in. And he felt weighted, heavy somehow, under a crushing, unadulterated sense of loneliness. He walked anyway, driven forward by the light of the moon, and as he went, he became colder and colder. It was like he froze from the inside out, his blood crystallizing in his veins and limbs becoming too numb and too frozen to bear the weight of his body. He could feel the sand yawn open wide beneath him, and he slipped into the blackness, shouting as he plummeted. The sensation of falling drove him into consciousness.

Grimmjow jolted awake and went to seize the bed sheets in front of him as if they would tether him and keep him from really falling. He woke to a body that felt like he’d been deepthroating broken glass all night and bashing his head into a wall simultaneously. Still drunk, he felt like he was still drunk somehow, sodden in his bones. It was raining, the soft sound of it pelting against the roof the perfect white noise. He could feel something, _someone_ , a long line of heat behind him, lying too close. And for one horribly terrifying moment, Grimmjow was afraid that he was still dreaming, still stuck running through sand, exhausted and alone. Unsure if this was just another strange dream, he rolled his head slightly on the pillow to free his mouth.

“Ichi?” he murmured questioningly. Grimmjow didn’t flinch when he felt a warm hand caress his cheek almost too gently. Ichigo’s fingers smoothed over Grimmjow’s cheekbones, thumbed at his temple, traced the socket of his eye and his jawline before falling to his neck where he rested it against Grimmjow’s throat. Though he was still half-asleep, a cold dose of fear trickled through him.

“I could kill you. It would be so easy, so painless, and over so quickly.” Ichigo’s voice was quiet, muted, just a purr of words in Grimmjow’s ear. “You’d never even know.”

The fear ramped up inside Grimmjow’s body, like blast of freezing electricity sizzling all down the miles of nerves crowded inside of him. He meant to move, to jerk away from Ichigo for safety because those words _scared him._ This wasn’t the Ichigo he’d spent the last five weeks battling in video games, arguing over Grimmjow’s lack of cooking abilities, or debating the morality of theft. This was the Ichigo he’d met the first time when he was sprawled on his couch, his eyes a hard, cold amber, nothing like the warm, almost _fond_ look he’d give Grimmjow every once in a while. Grimmjow swallowed reflexively and could have sworn he felt Ichigo’s hand tighten on his neck, press down on the subtle movement of his throat.

“I haven’t broken our deal,” Grimmjow managed to say.

“The moment you opened that door on the second day, you broke our deal.” And, well, shit. Ichigo was right. But Grimmjow hadn’t come all this way with only six days to go until his supposed freedom to bow out now.

“Then you should have killed me then. Why _didn’t_ you kill me then?” Grimmjow felt Ichigo hesitate, felt his entire body tense behind him, shaking the bed almost imperceptibly. Ichigo’s moment of hesitation was like a catalyst for Grimmjow, forcing him to man up. He rolled over swiftly, Ichigo’s hand sliding across his shoulder as he did, and sat up. He clenched his jaw, fully awake now, and glared down at Ichigo, “Why the fuck didn’t you kill me then, huh? Wasn’t that our deal? That if I tried to leave, you were going to kill me? Or was nearly breaking my hand in the door close enough?”

Grimmjow stopped himself there though, driven into silence by the sight in front of him. The first thing Grimmjow noticed was that Ichigo was not in his standard suit-and-jacket get up; he was wearing what looked like dark jeans and a hoodie. With his back to the light, Ichigo’s face was in shadow and his already dark eyes gleamed from where he was lying in Grimmjow’s bed, propped up on one elbow. The look on Ichigo’s face, the twisted confusion, the soft, agonized lines between his brows was what hinted to Grimmjow that he was really awake. There was something so painfully real about Ichigo’s expression in that moment, maybe because he was displaying more emotion than Grimmjow had ever seen from him before. But the anger was still simmering in his blood, driving him into complete consciousness as he fixed Ichigo with an enraged glare.

“Do not mistake my decision as mercy.” Ichigo’s expression didn’t waver in the least. 

“Well it sure as shit means something don’t it, _Soul Reaper_?” Grimmjow rasped, voice nearly used up, anger hot as kiln coals sweeping through his body. “Why don’t you try and kill me then?” Grimmjow snarled, grappling with the covers to get out from under them. When he got himself upright, he listed violently to the side, hand shooting out to grip the headboard to steady himself. It took a moment, but the world righted around him, stopped swimming, focused. He was left with the sensation of a migraine beginning to throb behind his eyes.

“I’ve tried everything to pry you away from this life you’re needlessly clinging to. I’ve _helped_ you get your shit together. I’ve shown you Hueco Mundo, for fucks sake.”

Grimmjow reeled back, visions of sunless, barren white sands and a black sky flashing in the back of his head. His eyes shot open and Ichigo was standing in front of him, blazing with righteous fury, almost literally. A wavering shroud of translucent black was crawling across his bared skin, shimmering like the weird feather-like things he often left behind. His eyes were so fucking dark that they were all pupil. His hands were clenched in fists at his sides and a bolt of sobriety shot through Grimmjow. Shit, he was in no condition to put up a fight, much less take a punch.

“Maybe death is the only thing left to help open your eyes.”

Grimmjow felt that maybe he should have seen the foot coming. The same foot that had kicked his legs out from under him just yesterday in the same sweeping arc. Falling to the carpet knocked less of the air from his lungs than the concrete floor of his basement, and this time he had half the mind to throw his arms up in defense to avoid Ichigo’s unnaturally strong grip. When the stars finally cleared from his eyes, he caught the flicker of Ichigo’s orange hair as the bastard straddled his waist again, settling his weight almost entirely onto Grimmjow’s torso. It was the flash of silver, of steel, of a chef’s knife that Ichigo must have popped down into the kitchen and swiped that kicked Grimmjow’s heart into high gear and opened the flood gates of his adrenaline.

Hand lashing out on instinct, Grimmjow caught a hold of Ichigo’s wrist, the one attached to the hand that was currently brandishing a six-inch knife at his throat. Ichigo bore down on him, a playful, glittering look in his eyes, as if Grimmjow was just a bad joke he couldn’t take seriously even if he wanted to. It set Grimmjow’s blood on fire and he gnashed his teeth, arms burning from fending the inhuman bastard off. The knife was too close, so close to the hollow of Grimmjow’s throat, so close to ending a near six weeklong struggle in one clean slice.

“I don’t understand what you think you’re holding onto,” Ichigo said, voice smooth and unaffected as he pushed more weight down onto Grimmjow. “You don’t need these people, they wouldn’t miss you if you died tomorrow. What’s the point of this house? All this shit you have. Everything you own and you’re still _alone_. You’re still that kid someone gave up, you’re still that kid that decided if the first pair didn’t want to keep you, you were gonna make damn sure that no one after wanted to either. _For what,_ Grimmjow? What have you gained from this?”

Grimmjow could feel the muscles deep in his shoulders already beginning to tremble with the strain of keeping the knife and its wielder at bay. “Fuck you!” he growled, gripping Ichigo’s wrists, one in each hand, hard enough to restrict blood flow, hard enough to hurt.

“You’re a menace to yourself. You’ve destroyed almost every possibility for someone to give a shit about you and what you do with your life. And those you can’t shake you keep at arm’s length. You’ve destroyed yourself in the process.” Ichigo grinned, something slow, something almost sinister, right into Grimmjow’s wide-eyed face. “I told you, if you wanna live, you gotta prove to me that you want it.”

With a snarl, Grimmjow pushed back, hands shaking from the strain where they held Ichigo’s arms. Ichigo’s eyes widened imperceptibly as Grimmjow wrenched his wrist in the wrong direction, and that was the only opening Grimmjow needed. In a swift twist, Grimmjow buried the knife to the handle in Ichigo’s chest, just to the left of his sternum. Grimmjow closed his eyes against the sickening thunk the knife made as he embedded all six inches of the blade into Ichigo’s chest cavity. But when he looked up, Ichigo’s eyes were no longer their usual amber and white. They were golden and filled with black as dark as oil. And then came the blood, spilling red and impossibly bright, down the handle of the knife and over Grimmjow’s shaking hands. It dripped onto his chest and sweatshirt, spattered his neck and his cheek, hot and reeking of copper and iron.

The shock was immediate. Grimmjow let go of the knife, not that it was going to go anywhere with the way it was firmly lodged in Ichigo’s chest. He scrambled out from underneath Ichigo, the blood dripping across his jeans, hitting the plush carpet beneath them, staining it. But Ichigo. Ichigo was _grinning,_ fingers splayed around the handle protruding from his body, the other hand flat against the floor to hold himself up.

“I knew you had it in you,” Ichigo teased, still smiling, pulling his hand away to see it wet with blood as he sat back on his knees. “How’d that feel?”

God, he was _shaking._ And it was impossible to tell if it was from rage, adrenaline, or fear. “ _Are you_ _fucking with me?_ ” Grimmjow bellowed, voice nearly cracking.

“It was a test. You passed. Had to make sure you weren’t going to tap out on me at the end here.” Ichigo reached back up and yanked the knife free from his chest, holding it loosely, carelessly in his blood-soaked hand. When he looked back up at Grimmjow, the black was fading from his eyes, the gold dulling to its usual amber.

Grimmjow shot upright and launched himself at Ichigo, blind with rage. He didn’t miss the black that bled back into Ichigo’s eyes as if it was some sort of instinctual protection, as if Grimmjow was a legitimate threat to him. But Ichigo dropped the knife nonetheless, the thump of it hitting the stained carpet audible even over Grimmjow’s snarl. He grabbed ahold of Ichigo’s shoulder in a steel grip, shoved him up against the side of the bed, throwing all his strength into it as his other hand went for the wound he’d just made. Grimmjow didn’t hesitate as he put his fingers to the tear in Ichigo’s hoodie, soaked with blood.

It was mortifying, but more than that, Grimmjow realized just what he was feeling. Not awful because he’d just _stabbed_ a person, but because he’d stabbed _Ichigo._ What if he’d hurt him? What if Soul Reapers were weak against kitchen knives? Fuck if he knew. This was about Grimmjow—and how much emotion he was actually displaying and fuck. His feelings had to be written all over his face, in the tightness of his body as he touched the tear in the fabric and found no wound beneath it, the shock on his face as he looked up into Ichigo’s clear eyes. There was nothing, not even a scratch, not even a scar to say the skin had been broken once. _A test._ Because Grimmjow had taunted Ichigo, provoked him, tried to call his bluff and Ichigo had delivered in spades, as he always did, just to prove his point.

Just last night he had… _They_ had. It felt like years ago. _Stop it,_ he wanted to shout. _Stop looking at me like that._ Like he’d done exactly what Ichigo had wanted, like Ichigo was proud somehow. He needed to reign it in, shut it down, wipe clean whatever was showing on his face right now that Ichigo was reading. Control, it was all about control. Ichigo said he couldn’t be killed, at least not by a human. So, a knife to the chest was no sweat off his back, right? Fuck, he was angry but he didn’t know if he was more angry at himself or Ichigo, for falling for it.

Six weeks. It had only taken six weeks. And there they were, none of it making any sense, at least not to Grimmjow. The way Ichigo was still smiling, face split by it as he reached up to clasp Grimmjow’s hand where it still hovered over the should-be wound. His palm was warm and clean of any blood, unlike Grimmjow’s, but he didn’t seem to mind as he gave a little squeeze. There Grimmjow was again, just like yesterday, staring at someone that had threatened him, pretended to try to kill him, imprisoned him in his own house, challenged him, goaded him into arguments, forced him to reevaluate who he was, _why_ he was. He knew, he fucking _knew_ there were maybe three people he gave a shit about out of everyone he worked with. He knew he walked around like he was wrapped in barbed wire, walls upon walls upon walls thrown up to keep everybody out. He didn’t know how to let people in, at least he thought he didn’t. But it had been easy to let Ichigo in, and he didn’t know why. Easy maybe because Ichigo was always there, had been, every single god damn day for almost six weeks, in his face, in his space, eyes spitting fire, running his mouth constantly. Cracking jokes, making mostly empty threats, psychoanalyzing Grimmjow until he was nearly begging to get punched in the teeth. It was like he’d come with a rug, threw it over the barbed wire of Grimmjow’s walls, and scaled them with ease.

There Grimmjow was again, staring at someone he couldn’t have, couldn’t touch, couldn’t _keep._

Grimmjow couldn’t help the full body flinch he gave, wrenching his hand out of Ichigo’s affectionate grasp. He released Ichigo’s shoulder where he still held him, standing bolt upright. His head was pounding like someone was taking a sledgehammer to his skull, mouth still dry, throat still sore, stomach churning, but all he could focus on was the blood that covered his hands. Red, red like any other human being, staining the wrists of his sweatshirt, his chest, dried to his neck and his chin and his right cheek.

Grimmjow had been a professional jewel thief for upwards of five years. He’d done stupid shit as a teenager, fucked around with the wrong people, but always made himself scarce when things got too serious. He’d held guns to people’s head as a threat, always unloaded, not that any of them had known that. He’d never resorted to physical violence during a robbery, never need to. Intimidation always worked better. Brandish a weapon, make some believable threats, people were always more than willing to cooperate. Because of those choices and all that meticulous planning, he’d never had someone else’s blood on him before. Now he did. And it had been a _joke,_ a fucking test.

If redemption involved him stabbing someone to prove himself, to prove that he was willing to change, wanted to live, be _good,_ when over the course of his young life he’d never had to do so before, then Grimmjow wasn’t sure he wanted his soul saved.

“Grimm—”

“You should leave,” Grimmjow said, voice quiet, deadly calm, controlled. He stooped to pick up the knife, hoping Ichigo couldn’t see the way his hand was shaking. He couldn’t meet Ichigo’s eyes, couldn’t look at the imploring look he knew was there. God, it wasn’t even about the knife anymore. Six weeks of bullshit and the only thing that made him feel like he’d been brutalized were Ichigo’s words.

“Grimm, I di—”

“I’ll see you in six days,” Grimmjow murmured, heading for the door, gripping the handle of the knife so tightly that his knuckles whited-out against his skin.

*******

Grimmjow wasn’t exactly expecting to make friends with anyone, ever, least of all Ichigo. In his lifestyle, casual acquaintanceships were easier, no false pretenses of friendship or having to be indebted to someone, nothing there for anyone to use as blackmail. At least, that was the reasoning he’d always used as justification. Just another instance of his prickly demeanor, he realized then. Only the people that had really dug their heels in and held their ground were the ones he considered friends: Kisuke, who had all but cried when he realized Grimmjow was too old to be adopted by him, Nel, who blubbered and then beat the shit out of him every time he tried to shrug her off, and Starrk, who checked in once every three months by showing up at his doorstep and demanding to be taken out to dinner.

But now, _fuck_. He wandered the house with his half-empty glass of water, the way it should have been when he’d woken that one morning almost six weeks ago. Now it was too quiet somehow, too empty, too _lonely._ Not that Grimmjow would admit that to anyone else under anything less than torture. Because it meant admitting that Ichigo had been right.

That maybe Ichigo’s means and methods had been misguided, but the intentions were there, his belief that Grimmjow was capable of having a change of heart. Grimmjow quelled those thoughts immediately. A responsibility, that was what Ichigo had called him once. A job, Grimmjow had always corrected, and he still thought that. He was just a blip on Ichigo’s never-ending timeline. He was like a six-week rehab stint before an inevitable return to the real world and all its temptations. And the house, all his stuff? He had to do something with all the money he made, right? He wasn’t attached to much of it, having thrown six figures at some team of interior designers when he’d bought the place so they would furnish it without bothering him. This life, once he’d got his bearings, had been easy. It had been easy to plot, and plan, and execute his thefts. It had been easy to establish himself as a force to be reckoned with, as someone who wasn’t worth challenging. No connections meant no feelings to have to work through or sort through. It had been easy to be _alone,_ because it had made all of what he did easier. Accepting less, taking less, learning to live without. There had never been anything, or anyone, worth giving it all up for before. But now, _now._ It was a terrible idea, a stupid notion.

Maybe Ichigo had been right, maybe it was a form of destruction, like self-immolation. Burning, obsessed with setting fire to the parts of himself he didn’t like, tearing at his flesh and setting fires in his bones to smelt down into something new before the rainstorms could save him. Burning, like a proper arsonist, like a textbook masochist obsessed with destroying himself and all the good things life had ever tried to give him.

*******

True to form, Ichigo was nowhere to be seen or heard for the next five days. There were no feathers, no amber eyes watching Grimmjow from his periphery, no hair-raising sensation that someone else was in the room with him.

It had taken Grimmjow what felt like hours to scrub the blood from his body. He’d stood under the hot spray of the shower until the hot water tank had run cold, scrubbing at his hands, at his face. He’d tried to get the blood from his clothes after that, having let them soak, but it was useless. With a sneer, he’d shoved them down into the trash, feeling defeated, wrung out, used. After looking up the best way to clean blood from carpet, he’d slopped a bucket upstairs to his bedroom and tried to scrub the stain out on his hands and knees. It had spread and spread, getting worse before it had started to come out. Just that had taken up the entirety of his afternoon. He was exhausted now. Or maybe he had always been.

There was no fanfare with that realization, no sweeping epiphany to herald his change of heart. It was just him standing at the back door, fingers aching from gripping a scrub brush, arms sore, staring out the window at the torrential downpour that hadn’t let up since the night before, cup of coffee in hand, the steam curling up to caress his nose. He just wanted it to be over. He tried to read, to distract himself. He slept more than his body needed, having decided that being unconscious was easier than being awake, his brain overthinking everything. He tried to work out, punching the sandbag harder and harder, gritting his teeth, wanting to scream or yell. He hit the stupid thing until he tweaked his wrist on a bad swing.

He was so… _angry._ Maybe that was what had been consuming him for the last several years. Anger that had festered for so long that it had rotted away into loneliness and despair. It all just made him angrier. _How does it come out of you?_ he wanted to scream. _I ache in my bones._ _I have become the kind of hollow that can never be filled back in._

*******

When Grimmjow got up on the fated morning, he went about the start of his day as if nothing had ever changed, as if nothing had ever happened. Showering, dressing himself, styling his hair, chugging three cups of coffee until he felt somewhat human. _Fuck it,_ he thought to himself as he rinsed the mug, dried it, and put it back in the cabinet. If he was going to hell, or Hueco Mundo, he might as well go in style.

He didn’t know if he should leave a note, or tell somebody. He was fairly certain the day was going to end with him choking on white sand under a black, moonlit sky. It wasn’t like he had many affairs to put in order. It was really just his house and the items within it, and he was too young to have bothered to create a last will and testament. The very idea of sitting down with a pen and paper and divvying up the things that belonged to him made his skin crawl. Grimmjow figured that if anyone deserved all his worldly and material possessions, it was Kisuke. Even if it was only as recompense for the eccentric hermit having put up with him for so many years, mentoring him, fencing his steals, treating him like a beloved friend.

It was as he sunk into the couch with a resigned huff, phone in hand, did he realize that it was the twenty-first. The day before Grimmjow had somewhat agreed to move, or at the very least, house the Pollock that Kisuke had acquired. But the very thought of leaving the house to pick up a painting, of going anywhere when he still felt like he was covered in Ichigo’s blood, still felt scrubbed raw inside and out somehow, made him feel cold and empty. He couldn’t do it. He tapped the call button and waited as the line rang.

“I was thinking about you this morning!” Kisuke chirped into the receiver as he picked up, his usual chipper self. “Were your ears ringing? I assume you’re feeling better now.”

The words stuck in Grimmjow’s throat. The lies, the truth, all of it, wedged there like he was choking on it. It felt like he was, choking, body aching for breath.

“Kisuke, I can’t keep doing this,” Grimmjow said quietly as he stared blankly out the window, watching the rain pelt down. The silence that followed was harrowing. Kisuke didn’t say anything, no whispered remark or joke, he didn’t even hang up. Grimmjow pulled his phone from his ear to be sure that the call hadn’t disconnected.

“So, they got to you too, huh?”

All thought in his head shorted out like a blown lightbulb. “What?” Grimmjow said, voice muted with disbelief. He was met with a soft chuckle that the phone barely registered. 

“I can’t believe you told me you had pneumonia. I was going to have Tessai deliver soup.” Kisuke sounded almost mournful before he paused. “Six weeks is not very long. Even I was given a year, initially. Though that’s now turned into a life sentence. You won’t hear me complaining though.”

“I—” Grimmjow faltered, standing up out of sheer bewilderment, brain trying to process what he’d just heard. “ _What?_ ”

“Oh, nothing!” Kisuke laughed and Grimmjow could hear the crack of his paper fan unfurling. “You just reminded that there’s a special lady I need to call.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the weird shit you and Yoruichi get up to. Tell me what the hell you meant just now,” Grimmjow ground out, his original reason for calling all but forgotten. There was a pause on the other end as Grimmjow shuddered in a breath, reaching up to card a hand through his hair, cursing instantly. He’d forgotten he’d taken the time to gel it this morning and he blew a gust of air upward at the tendrils of hair now tickling his forehead.

“Let’s do dinner on Thursday, okay? Tessai has a new recipe he’s been waiting to try, and it sounds like it would feed a small army.”

Grimmjow was gripping his phone so hard that he could feel the case creaking under the strain of his fingers. “Did you not hear me?” Grimmjow snapped, chest going hot with anger and cold with shock. “I said I’m done—”

“Just because you’re done with the work does not mean I’m done with you. ‘Fraid I’m not that easy to shake,” Kisuke laughed, carefree, as if the very idea was a joke to him. “Besides, I have friends with legitimate careers who would love an insider’s take on security. Galleries, exhibitions, showcases.”

Blue eyes as wide as saucers stared distractedly out the rain-blurred window. “I—”

“Your expertise isn’t obsolescent simply because you wish to use it differently,” Kisuke interrupted sagely, as undeterred as he always was by Grimmjow’s fury. “In fact, I could probably have a few good contacts lined up for you when you come Thursday.”

A second chance, just dumped in his lap. He hadn’t even asked for it. It was just Kisuke doing what Kisuke had always done for him, expecting little to nothing in return, at least not anything that wasn’t easily repaid. It wasn’t even the first time he had offered something like that, Grimmjow realized with a start. He’d failed miserably, hopelessly to do the only thing he assumed would save him, by trying to clean up his life under the threat of eternal damnation. And though he hadn’t regretted standing unknowingly on the precipice of perdition for so many years, he regretted what he had forbidden himself to have in all that time. He regretted all the times that he had turned down Kisuke’s offers, Nel’s kindness, even Starrk’s visits that weren’t unlike a seldom-seen relative blowing in from out of town and demanding things. He had thought his isolation had made him strong, impenetrable, unconquerable somehow, but he had only exacerbated his own suffering. Maybe that was what it was really all about: alleviating the source of his pain, his suffering, his loneliness.

“Thank you,” Grimmjow said gruffly after a moment. “I think that I’d like that, change it up a little, try something new.”

Like he’d been summoned by the words alone, a shudder rippled its way up Grimmjow’s spine, raising the hair on the back of his neck. Grimmjow nearly wrenched his fucking neck as he swung around to find Ichigo standing in his foyer, clothes sharp, gaze even sharper.

“I hope they’re worth it, Grimm,” Kisuke said suddenly, too knowing for his own damned good. Grimmjow decided then and there that he didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was about to be buried in an otherworldly desert like some kind of homicide victim. “But, if it’s come to this, they must be. I’ve never known you to give up anything.”

“I’ll have to let you know.”

*******

They appraised each other from where they stood, separated by furniture and a considerable distance. Grimmjow tried not to react to the sight of Ichigo in jeans and a hoodie, looking comfortable, casual, _human._ He tried not to react at all, tried to internalize the frenzied thundering of his heart, the dawning realization that this was it. He had expected Ichigo to look cold and calculating, the same way he had looked sitting where Grimmjow had just been, six weeks ago to the day. He had expected not to find even a modicum of civility in Ichigo’s amber eyes after the fallout of their last encounter. He had expected to be looked at like he was just another responsibility of Ichigo’s that needed tending to, just another wayward soul on schedule to be moved along accordingly. He hadn’t expected to have to stare at the purple, half-moon circles under his eyes, dark like a fading black eye. Or the frustrated furrow of his brow as he stared at Grimmjow, looking thoroughly distressed. All of those things were the last thing he wanted to see right now.

“Just in time,” Grimmjow jested, plastering on a leering smile. He chucked his phone onto the couch, knowing he probably wasn’t going to need it where he was headed. “Am I allowed to have a smoke before ya take me down to the basement?”

“No,” Ichigo said almost immediately, and Grimmjow could see his jaw clench from where he was standing.

“Shame.” Not that he’d really wanted one anyway, but a little nicotine in the blood before being dealt his eternal punishment couldn’t have hurt.

Ichigo’s hands curled into fists at his sides and Grimmjow steeled himself for another potential all-out brawl. “I mean, no, I need to talk to you first.”

Grimmjow tried to make a show of it, tried not to look the way he felt inside; like a marionette, hollow, limbs awkward as he shoved his hands in his pockets. “Don’t tell me there are rules and regulations in the pit? For fuck's sake, a guy can’t even catch a break in Hell.”

The frustrated line of Ichigo’s brow creased even further and Grimmjow swallowed reflexively, mouth and throat dry. “I’m sorry, I should have said it then,” Ichigo began, taking a step in Grimmjow’s direction. “I just got too caught up in testing your resolve.”

“I don’t wanna hear this,” Grimmjow muttered, shoulders going rigid with tension as he realized this wasn’t about to be a crash course about being dead.

“Well that’s too fucking bad because I’m going to say it anyway,” Ichigo snapped, eyes lighting up for a short-lived moment. No, no, _no._ Grimmjow wanted this to be clinical, with the cold sort of professionalism it had started with. He didn’t want to think about _everything_ else that clouded that now, the everything else he could see clouding Ichigo’s eyes.

Anger surging back, Grimmjow’s lip curled as he set his teeth. He took a half-step forward, forgetting that distance was probably best, pulling his hands from his pockets. “Do your fucking job, or your responsibility, whatever the fuck you wanna call it! Get this shit off my back and get out of here or hurry up and drop my ass in that sad fuckin’ desert and leave. I’m done waiting,” he snarled and jabbed a thumb behind him. He reeled back, heart rocketing into his throat as Ichigo moved from the foyer to stand directly in front of him in a blink.

“You’ve fought me for _weeks,_ and I thought it was because you were just some unmitigated asshole with a phobia for personal change. But I get it now,” Ichigo said, voice quieting.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Grimmjow warned, voice a guttural growl in the back of his throat. There was heat in Ichigo’s eyes though, a determined glint, the same challenge, the same call to arms that had always been there. He took a step forward, and Grimmjow squared his shoulders, glaring down at him, unwilling to relent.

“I was the asshole, right?” Ichigo said, eyes still bright but expression growing somber. “I tried to get you to bend until you would break. I tried to rip it all away from you, the few things anyone has ever allowed you to have. And I tried to do it without giving you something else.”

The tips of his fingers were beginning to tingle, alive with barely suppressed rage. He’d been prepared to go quietly, but now he was rearing to fight his way down. Grimmjow didn’t want to be psychoanalyzed again, didn’t want Ichigo to keep reading him like he was an open book. It was demeaning, unnerving, that someone, anyone, could dress him down that easily. “I don’t care if you’re some immortal shitlord on the other side, I will beat the shit out of you if you don’t hurry up and end this.”

Ichigo’s eyes blazed bright for one flickering second before sputtering out as he hung his head slightly. His shoulders sagged, he seemed to deflate like a popped tire. When he looked at Grimmjow again, it was with sullen sadness, frustration pulling the corners of his mouth down into a deep frown. “You were afraid that I was going to take it all away and then you’d really have nothing, right? I should have paid closer attention.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Grimmjow saw Ichigo reaching for him, as if he meant to take ahold of his arm. He flinched away, rocking back on his heels and glowering at the gesture. Shut it down, he told himself. He didn’t want to back down, didn’t want to look weak in the face of impending catastrophe. But he couldn’t focus with Ichigo so close, smelling of spice and firewood, eyes two pools of amber fire blazing up at him. His chest ached, burned with everything he was tamping down, pummeling into submission. Over, he wanted it to be over. Maybe if he slugged Ichigo in the jaw again it would earn him that one-way ticket to Hell.

“Quit talkin’ like you haven’t already made up your mind. It doesn’t matter, it never did. Nobody gives a shit.” A sick sense of satisfaction, cold like ice water, bloomed in his chest as Ichigo’s expression twisted. “I’m _done_ , Ichigo. End it, now.”

“I give a shit!” Ichigo shouted, and that time Grimmjow did stumble back a step. He didn’t get far though, Ichigo’s hand lashing out to grab a fistful of his shirt and reel him back in. “I give a shit about _you_.”

Grimmjow was so stunned for a moment that he didn’t say anything, just stood there like a statute with his mouth half-open in shock. Ichigo flushed as if he only just realized what he said, as though he hadn’t meant to say it out loud, and froze where he was, one hand bunched in Grimmjow’s shirt, the other useless beside him. Grimmjow could only stare helplessly at him as Ichigo opened and closed his mouth a few times, a flurry of emotions flitting through his gaze.

Ichigo took in a shuddering breath, leaned forward a little, his eyes wide and distressed. “I’m trying to tell you that I get it now. Why that other Soul Reaper stayed, what she must have found.”

Grimmjow staggered back as though Ichigo had hit him. “You don’t—” he began hoarsely, wanting to make a run for it, but he was transfixed by Ichigo’s eyes again. At how hazel they were even in the rainy morning light coming through the window, at how vulnerable, and open, and honest they looked.

“Mean that?” Ichigo finished, looking wounded, and took another hesitant step into Grimmjow’s space, until they were nearly chest to chest. “Why would I lie to you?”

Grimmjow tried to swallow but there was nothing, his tongue like sandpaper in his mouth. “This isn’t funny,” he said, voice a little stronger.

There it was again, that look. The same look he caught Ichigo making out of the corner of his eye sometimes. Soft, unfairly kind, unbearably lonely. With his stupid-long eyelashes and sleepless undereye circles, Grimmjow wanted, and not for the first time, to shake him. As if shaking him would shake some sense into him. Maybe shake some sense into both of them.

“What’re you trying to say, _Soul Reaper?_ ” Grimmjow said, voice pitched low, throat still feeling like it was full of cotton.

“My entire existence has been about my duty to humanity, about what they needed, what they wanted. I’ve—” The way he looked up at Grimmjow, eyes wide and expression tender, fond. His hand went slack, releasing his hold on Grimmjow’s shirt, pressing his palm flat to his chest. “I’ve never taken anything for myself and I realized the other day that nobody ever told me that I _couldn’t_ , I just always assumed that I wasn’t allowed to.”

 _Don’t_ , Grimmjow wanted to shout, feeling the swell of something just under his sternum that wanted to fight his jerk reaction. The way Ichigo had been able to articulate it, the distinct feeling he’d had just the other day, made his chest quiver. The warmth of Ichigo’s hand was soaking through his shirt, into his skin, reigniting the spark of something there, the pilot light flame he’d been trying to blow out for weeks. The spark that maybe he was good enough, maybe he could do it, maybe he could prove himself because he relished the challenge and he’d been given the perfect opponent. Perfect in more ways than one. _Don’t say it unless you mean it._

Ichigo licked his lips, and Grimmjow could feel the nervous tremor through the hand over his heart. “I never wanted anything for myself until I met you.”

Grimmjow wasn’t sure which one of them made a noise, but it didn’t matter because then Ichigo was kissing him, bodies pressing together and mouth open and he was there with Grimmjow like he thought he wouldn’t ever get to be again. He slid a hand into Ichigo’s hair, held him tight and breathed him in while he kissed him: clove, and cinnamon, cedar caught in a blaze, familiar, _Ichigo_. Overwhelming. It made Grimmjow’s chest feel like it was peeling open. He kissed him hard, desperate, grabbing a lean hip with his free hand, swallowing all of Ichigo’s little sounds and feeding them back to him. Grimmjow couldn’t help it when they finally drew away from each other, he bit down on Ichigo’s lower lip and pulled it with him for a moment, savoring the groan that rumbled in Ichigo’s chest.

They stood there wrapped up in each other, Ichigo’s lips like the tremor of butterfly wings against Grimmjow’s. “I don’t want to be an immortal shitlord anymore if it means that I can’t have you.”

“Okay,” Grimmjow murmured, searing another kiss into Ichigo’s lips, like it was easy. And it was, it was the easiest thing he’d ever said, ever agreed to. Like everything was coming up roses, a fuckin’ garden of them at his feet. “Does this mean I’m off the hook?”

Ichigo smiled against his lips. “For now,” he said and Grimmjow pulled him back in, hand anchored in his brilliant orange hair.

“So, what?” Ichigo murmured, sounding unsure for the first time in six weeks. But the way he was looking up at Grimmjow was anything but unsure. Eyes warm and open and crinkled in the corners from his smile. “What now?”

Grimmjow craned his head back and stared at the blank ceiling before grinning. “What’re you doing Thursday?”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always appreciated! Thanks for reading!


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